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Nugget Hunting With The Deus


Bretski

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I have a standard Deus with the 9.5 and 9 inch HF coils. There is gold in our area, though the pieces are generally quite small, under 1/10th of a gram for sure. Anyone have any experience or advice on hunting gold with the Deus? Most of our gold is in big rocks and cobble as well so it's hard to work around them and get the depth we need.

Your thoughts?

Thanks

 

Brett

 

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A topic close to my heart. What I do is collect representative gold specimens from the area (via sluicing or panning - your methods may vary), then placing them in vials or baggies and salting in amongst the target area. Test various Deus programs and tweak the settings to find what works for you. I like the 9.5" elliptical for poking around boulders and cobble.

 

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I like the 9.5 as well, much better suited for poking around anything. I live in Central BC Canada so there is gold here, no doubt at all but where I am most of the gold is fine and generally deeper. 

I watch Aussie Gold and I see them pulling "rippers" only inches under the soil and I shake my head and only wish that I could have ground like that around me.

I pan regularly, and I do ok. Definitely not getting rich but fund nevertheless. Be really awesome If I could detect a nuggie someday and cross that off my bucket list lol.

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Your Deus in Gold Field with the HF coils running 31 kHz or higher should have no problem hitting shallow .1 gram gold nuggets/pickers if your dirt is not too mineralized where you are prospecting.  Checking the mineralization bar in the horseshoe graph profile should tell you. On the surface you may get a numerical ID of 98 or 99 with the horseshoe graph showing non ferrous on small gold. Depending on mineralization you may get no numerical target ID and bouncing ferrous/non ferrous response from the horseshoe graph on .1 gram gold nuggets or pickers at 2 to 3 " depth. Deeper than that you may get nothing on such small gold. The default Gold Field program is a really good place to start with a few adjustments. You will need to do a pumping ground balance for sure, use an iron amplitude reject setting of 0 to 2, reactivity 2 or 2.5, audio response 2 or 3, threshold around 5 and sensitivity around 90 depending on ground noise. You can also try the XY graphic profile also if you are in an area with larger gold. The WS4 back phones are pretty useless for gold prospecting for tiny gold especially in the wind. If you don't have the WS5s, you might want to get the audio adapter for the WS4 and plug in some good quality over the ear headphones so you can hear any really faint small gold targets.

I think there was recently a Deus Youtube video on Western USA gold prospecting with the Deus by a member of this forum.

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6 hours ago, Jeff McClendon said:

Checking the mineralization bar in the horseshoe graph profile should tell you.

To clarify, Jeff is talking about the profile setting that selects the screen with the horseshoe graph vs. the X-Y screen.  The mineralization bar graph runs vertically up the right side of that screen on the opposite side of the horseshoe graphic.  You need to be either swinging or pumping the coil (coil motion) to get a valid mineralization level reading.  Any peak readings 3/4 to full scale are considered severe mineralization.  Mineralization level on Deus is somewhat independent of the ground phase/ground balance numbers (i.e., you can have high mineralization without having higher than nominal ground phase numbers, in fact in heavily mineralized ground you may see a lot of variation in three ground phase number over a wide range above and below the nominal number).

Also be careful about running gold field Iron Audio Reject in heavily mineralized ground too high as it will react to the ferrous ground content and associated non-ferrous target down averaging and chop practically all target signal audio.  Use of none to low IAR settings as Jeff suggested is best.

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3 hours ago, Contraption said:

Here is a good video on tuning the Gold Field program. Note the DPR 600 uses the same program as found on the Deus and ORX.

 

 

Gary is not a gold nugget prospector and he is not using a Deus in this video. The Depar/ORX is similar but it does not have exactly the same display or features in its Gold programs.

Abenson from this forum very recently made a nice introductory Youtube video using a Deus with the 9" HF coil in typical Rocky Mountain dirt. Here it is......

 

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I'm no nugget hunting expert. But the Deus will pick up the small bits of gold about as well as any gold hunting VLF. Hot rocks in the area I was hunting were fairly common. But that's were the gold hides, in those areas other avoid.

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